In a data communication network, most of traffic models are in a burst mode. Therefore, some methods for limiting network traffic need to be adopted to prevent multiple problems caused by burst traffic from occurring on the network, such as network congestion. A common traffic limiting manner is a token bucket-based manner. There are mainly two common token bucket management technologies: a timing bucket filling mechanism and an event bucket filling mechanism. For the event bucket filling mechanism, when a token bucket consuming event occurs, an operation of filling tokens in a token bucket is triggered, and traffic is limited according to a comparison between the number of tokens in the token bucket and the length of a packet. For a communication network, generally, there are many scheduling nodes under a traffic limiting apparatus, and each scheduling node has a plurality of token buckets, so that a huge number of token buckets exist. By adopting the solution in the prior art, a timestamp of each token bucket is stored generally by adopting an internal memory, and one timestamp is allocated to each token bucket, thereby occupying a large quantity of internal memory resources and further increasing hardware cost.